We’ve discussed how if you are not rebranding as an SEL expert you are doing it wrong. But, related, if you’re a teachers union or association and you’re not preparing a job action you’re doing it wrong, too. The Los Angeles union managed to make a class size provision they’ve basically been OK with for years a primary cause of their strike and made the schools getting the best results in the city out to be the villain. That’s pretty good, but you can probably do it if you apply yourself.

In any event, long term the teachers unions are in huge trouble and pretty much all trends auger against them and more Janus-like cases are coming. Near term? Things are not so bad! So enjoy.

More on the politics here. Unclear how not worrying about kids stuck in crummy schools is particularly progressive, but whatevs, as the kids say.

There are some factual problems with this New Yorker article (wealthy kids are not driving charter growth in Los Angeles, c’mon…) but what it really shows is just how bad the narrative is for the school district here and how much the teachers union has succeeded in getting its story into the larger political slipstream and moment.

Who are ESA’s benefiting in AZ? A debate! (A debate that seems answerable with good data?)

The Aspen Institute commission on SEL released its report yesterday. Not an unimportant issue and something schools should pay attention to, but does seem to be the new thing that everyone is pouring their hopes into and repackaging their ideas to fit into – and everyone is now an SEL expert, of course.

Here’s a pretty good look at the fiscal pressure on LAUSD and its various causes:

Some facts about the cause of LAUSD’s financial woes straight from a 2015 independent financial review. (note how many recommendations were not acted upon). Sorry, this is long, but that reflects the complexity of the root causes. @capriceyoung@MichaelPetrilli@arotherham

The strike is on in LA. It’s about bigger political agendas than the district (national narratives, political ambitions of people involved, etc…) and so the district’s situation is getting lost. Remember, from 2001-2016 expenditures in LAUSD are up 55%, but salaries and wages 24%. That’s in large part because spending on benefits are up 138% over that time. That’s the downward pressure on wages that is frustrating teachers but also hamstringing the finances of addressing their frustration. The problem is particularly acute in LA but hardly limited to LA or California.

School is too boring in too many cases. Hard to argue with that. Unfortunately, a lot of the ideas to make it less boring would also make it less educational – solving for that is a real puzzle for the sector to address.

Looks like there will be a teacher strike in LA. A few things to keep in mind:

First, teachers are understandably frustrated and mad, their situation is not great. But, at the same time, the district has substantialfiscalchallenges, too, that are bad news for students. Yes…two things are true at once! And this sector generally doesn’t do those kinds of issues well. What it will take to right the ship in LA is more than marginal changes.

Second, these strikes can be unpredictable. The 2012 Chicago strike, which like this one was preordained for larger political reasons than just the immediate financial issues, turned out to be a huge boon for the union there, its leader Karen Lewis, and changed the trajectory of teachers union and reform politics. The timing seems good for this one but who knows, these things can be unpredictable.

Elsewhere, Christine Rampell takes a look at birth rates and what that could mean. More immediately, in the next decade we will have more people over 65 than under 18 and that means all kinds of formal issues (various tax issues that impact school finance, health care and retirement costs) and informal ones (support for public schools) as the nation’s demographic burden continues to shift from young to old.

Fifteen-year-old Joseph, whose mother is from Antigua and is standing beside him, has been skipping class and falling in with the wrong crowd. In June he was jumped at school as part of a gang initiation, which left him with a black eye and bruises. Joseph’s father was deported back to Saint Vincent and his older brother was arrested in connection with a shooting. So Joseph not showing up for class is the least of this family’s problems…

Elizabeth Warren is in. She says, “The problem we’ve got right now in Washington is that it works great for those who’ve got money to buy influence, and I’m fighting against that.” Hard to argue with the sentiment and she has a record, but squaring it with her evolving education positions may be a challenge. It also points up a challenge for Democratic reformers as support for ideas like giving parents more choice in public education is in question.

Only one Texas college or university graduates more than 100 black men a year – and it’s an HBCU. Texas is hardly the only state with appalling numbers like this – numbers that contribute to the problem recruiting teachers downstream – but this article takes a broader look. (Yes, Texas has fewer African-Americans per-capita than some states but with about 3m and 12% of its population it ranked 4th among states in absolute numbers and 21st per-capita in the 2010 census. The graduation rates among Texas schools further point to a problem).

Hailly Korman with an interesting thought experiment about whether new court cases might provide traction for constitutional rights for students. Count me as skeptical on the current Supreme Court’s appetite for any of that, but if a state did what she describes then perhaps that would trigger some unique claims.

Posting light to non-existent until after the New Year. Happy Holidays.

Rick Hess has a provocative piece out chiding reformers for performative listening and offering a typology of the various forms of that activity. He’s onto something and you can see examples of what he describes around us, but his take seems wide of the mark in a subtle but meaningful way. The core problem here, I would argue, is not fake listening while stubbornly advancing a fixed agenda, rather it’s faddishness and performative listening in service of the latest fad. (And really, we could do with a bit more stick-to-itness couldn’t we?).

The reform world loves to blame the “system” for being awfully faddish, but in practice we’re no better at resisting the whims of fashion. Best I can tell, there seem to be a few reasons for this or a few missing checks on faddishness.

One, most people are careerists so they check out what’s in or popular and go with that. File that under most of what you need to know to understand life you can learn in a high school cafeteria. To be sure, it’s hardly an ill-considered thing to do in a field that doesn’t really tolerate heretics let alone support them. Few want to pay a price with funders, patrons, or favored constituencies. It’s not a lot of fun and the costs are real. Sure, hoop jumpers abound but overall I’d judge gently because it’s more that people have mortgages to pay and kids to put through college or people who depend on them. That’s real life.

A second cause, I’d suggest, is lack of broad mindset or, put differently, narrow focus in school and often life. The ed reform world, broadly speaking, is a pretty elite bunch in terms of educational background, where we live, culture, touchstones and markers, and so forth. That sort of homogeny makes it a lot easier for fads to spread. For all of the attention to diversity these days, preciouslittle is devoted to viewpoint diversity or life experience diversity. For instance, when is the last time you heard an education organization say they want to prioritize hiring more veterans or people with a right-of-center or free market orientations and then doing it? More people saying the same thing is not actually diversity. Yet real diversity, in all its facets, very much including race, ethnicity, economic class, is a pretty good antidote to faddishness.

And a third is a smart vigorous debate, or rather lack of one to act as a check. If Valerie Strauss or Diane Ravitch version 3.0 are the sparring partners for people who think that a system that produces the outcomes ours does needs some real change, then the debate is going to be more heat than light. What gets lost is the vigorous back and forth that’s vital to progress. Evidence and real debate about that evidence and how to think about it is the best check on faddishness. Instead, we get mostly howling at the moon and a lot of tribalism and blunt force politics.

For instance, here’s a reality: KIPP schools are, on average, pretty good. They turn out students who go on to much better educational outcomes than similar students and as a result they are literally changing lives right now. But, even taking KIPP and similar schools as the “best” at any scale raises an uncomfortable reality – they are not nearly closing the gap in outcomes overall so they are falling short of real ambitions for equity.

There are two ways to have a discussion about what that means. One, is the way we have it now. We mostly don’t. Because no one wants to say “even KIPP…” because the Greek chorus starts up right away with “even reformers say…,” followed by “some version of ‘so let’s just do more of the same’ or ‘reformers are privatizers.’ The other way to have the conversation is to say, yeah, KIPP is pretty amazing and interesting but a lot more needs to happen to get to real equity (to its credit that’s pretty much what KIPP says). But, tactically that’s a lead with your chin way in to the toxic public space we tolerate in this sector. So, rather than thoughtful, much of the debate about KIPP is all manner of claims from the crazy to the noxious, not a curious culture about what there is and is not to learn here, vigorous debate about that, and what it means to this shared effort of improving a dysfunctional system that doesn’t work for a lot of Americans. KIPP’s of course just one example, but it’s illustrative of how things are talked about publicly.

And, finally, as you no doubt noticed, things are pretty tribal right now nationally as well, so there is little cross cutting engagement and discussion. Bipartisanship or multi-partisanship is not a foolproof check on faddishness to be sure, but it’s sometimes a useful stress test. Best I can tell, much of the education world (on all sides) is more interested in ideological purity these days than the messy heterodox views many people hold on a variety of complicated questions where the evidence is conflicting or limited.

You essentially have an elite pretty cloistered group not having much of a vigorous debate because the politics are insane.

So it’s not that people aren’t listening, though some surely are not, it’s that we listen and then run from one fad to the next. In that way, performative listening is at most merely a symptom of a far bigger problem facing those who want to change the structure of American education.

Not to leave you on a down note, I don’t think this state of affairs is hopeless at all, and it seems that if they were inclined funders could play a big role in helping to address it. Really, we all could.

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